What’s Happening on Hulu

We’re having a ball with this week’s festival of free Criterion titles on Hulu. These films, all of which feature elegantly creepy facial accessories, may provide great inspiration for your next costume party. They’re also terrific movies, running the gamut from Japanese horror to lightly comic morality tales from France. Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba is a supernatural revenge story haunted by an unforgettable kabuki mask. Max Ophuls’s Le plaisir is a triptych of Guy de Maupassant adaptations, the first of which concerns a masked mystery man who disrupts a posh party. Hiroshi Teshigahara’sThe Face of Anotheris an existential sci-fi work starring Tatsuya Nakadai as a man who undergoes a radical face transplant. There’s a gallery of grotesque demons in Benjamin Christensen’s silent horror film about witchcraft through the ages,Häxan.And how could we forget Georges Franju’s poetic shocker Eyes Without a Face,which features one of the most unsettling masks we‘ve ever seen, a piece of smooth, expressionless plastic that hides a terrible secret. You can watch this elegant work of horror in its entirety below, or at Hulu. And be sure to browse through Criterion’s hundreds of other titles on Hulu Plus, and sign up for just $7.99 a month to see them all.